


John & Jade: Stargaze

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, postgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-09 21:43:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12897459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: Jade misses the stars sometimes.





	John & Jade: Stargaze

“The stars are different,” Jade says.

She’s sitting out in the backyard, arms clasped around her knees, head tilted up at the sky. There’s nothing wrong with that, but a certain droop in her ears had prompted you to head outside and check up on her. Everyone has their moments, when the game or whatever came before it catches up with them, but Jade’s one of the few whose previous moments led to homicide, so people are less likely to drag her out of a funk. But it’s practically your job to try. You’re her brother, after all, and you’ve both let each other down before. If that means losing some internal organs to the evil werewolf, that’s how it has to be. 

(That’s a joke, mostly, but you never can tell for sure.)

Now you settle into the grass and look up with her, staring at the darkness studded with lights you could see up close, if you wanted to. She’s right. No Orion’s belt, no Cassiopeia. No North Star to guide you. You live under a different sky now.

Jade knows – or knew? is it past tense if the things themselves are gone, even if your knowledge of them isn’t? - a lot more constellations than you did. Once on the battleship, before you all stopped doing things together, you’d stretched out on your backs and she’d tossed golf balls into the air, arranging them into shapes and giving them names. A bunch of them came from Greek myths, and you remembered some from the Percy Jackson books that had been a hit at your middle school. (Roxy said the movies were terrible; at least the world ended before Hollywood could ruin yet another perfectly decent story.) You’d recognized a few of the shapes from squinting through your telescope, although the streetlights made it hard to see. Dave sprite, living in a city full of bright lights, had almost never caught a clear glimpse of stars.

“On my island you could actually see part of the Milky Way,” she’d told you, and the golf balls clustered together into a long white band. “Looking up at it always made me feel so small, in a good way. It’s amazing.”

It’s amazing. You all use present tense when you shouldn’t – about galaxies, or your dad, or the corner store Dave sprite quipped he could find Milky Ways at, if he wanted them. Sometimes language takes a while to catch up with reality. Sometimes reality takes a while to catch up with you. That’s when you find yourselves sitting in your rooms, or on the roof, or in the damp grass of the backyard, staring at nothing.

In the present, she sighs. “Whenever I look up, it reminds me… We’re a long way from home.”

“This is home now,” you point out, and she turns her head to the side, not quite either a shake or a nod.

“You know what I mean.”

“Would you rather be back there?” You miss your old life sometimes, especially your dad, and how simple it all was, but what Jade has admitted of her childhood doesn’t sound great. At first it did – no school? no supervision? – but you’ve endured enough loneliness to spot the dark side. Of all of you, you’re the one who’d had the most to lose.

“No. Definitely not. But we lost a lot.” She peers up at the sky, shoulders slumped. “Galaxies.”

Back when she’d tried to teach you astronomy, you’d stared up at the greenish-blackish blur pretending to be the sky and suggested, “Hey, the trolls said they got to make the stars. Do you think we’ll be able to?”

“I doubt they made them personally,” Jade said with the caution of someone still trying to hang on to a few of the scientific theories about the universe. You’d caught her frowning at physics books a few times, taking it as a personal insult that she broke a few theories of basic time and space.

“They function, so not likely,” Dave sprite added. Although you think he holds more of a grudge against the trolls than he needs to, he had a point. All of them were too busy arguing and getting into trouble to make a cosmos that didn’t look haphazard and partly unfinished.

You waved your hand, unconsciously summoning a gust that sent the golf balls scattering and bouncing off each other. “Ok, sure, but they influenced them, right? Maybe we’ll get our own personal parts of the new solar system. I wonder what that’ll be like.” You squeezed your eyes shut, trying to pretend you were really outside somewhere instead of trapped on a tiny vessel zooming between realities. “I can’t wait to finally get off this stupid ship and see what the world looks like outside this game once we’ve won. Won’t it be great?”

Dave sprite had mumbled something about being tired and left then, leaving you propped up on your elbow looking after him. “What did I say this time?” you demanded. 

Jade had looked tired, but only for a moment. Then the expression cleared, like she’d hit the reset button on her face, and she’d smiled and reassembled the golf balls with a flick of her wrist. “Don’t worry about it. Hey, have I told you the stories about the Pleiades?”

 

She’d been trying to take care of you, you know now, not something any thirteen year old should have to do. Thirteen year olds can’t even take care of themselves. Sure, some of you tried, but it’s not like it ever ended well. 

Sixteen year olds can’t do much better. But here you are, feeling dampness soaking into the seat of your pants, because you can’t help trying to look after each other. And after the last three years, you owe it to her. 

“You have to get used to the new stars,” you say. “Then it won’t be so bad, looking up at them. We can do that by naming them.”

“Naming them?” She raises her eyebrows. “Do you know how many there are?”

“A lot?” you hazard. She rolls her eyes. “Bluh, whatever. We do have forever, you know. But I meant naming groups, like constellations.” You point to a cluster almost directly overhead. “We can base them on us, like the trolls and the Zodiac.” You turn to give her a good view of your profile. “Do you think that one looks like me?”

She snorts, as you’d hoped she would, and bats your hand away. “The constellations were based on their symbols, not their faces, and I never thought they were good matches anyway.”

“Fine then. That blobby group could be my knockoff Slimer.” You touch your chest, even though that shirt has long since been retired. “That trademark-infringing artwork is going way further than the artist intended. Do you think white dwarfs listen to DMCA takedown notices?”

“I guess that one kind of looks like a dog,” she concedes, gesturing to the right. Lines of green fire follow her fingertip, sketching out the shape like a connect-the-dots.

You grab her wrist, drawing out your own patterns in the sky. “I know you said we weren’t doing faces, but those kind of look like Karkat, with a big mouth for yelling and everything.”

She laughs, putting the finishing touches on your drawing herself. “Thanks. Now I can’t not see it.”

“So next time you look up at the stars, you’ll want to laugh.” You nudge her shoulder with your own. “See, I can be smart sometimes too.”

“I never said you weren’t.”

And the stars do look friendlier now. Next time you catch yourself looking up, wondering what else might be out there, you’ll see your friends. “Let’s go inside,” you say. “I can make hot chocolate.”

“With too much sugar?

“With the exact right amount,” you correct her. “It’s not my fault you being a demidog or whatever messes up your sense of taste.”

“Let’s get someone else to be the judge.”

“You’re on,” you say, and pull her to her feet.


End file.
